It's easy to forget how stupid the Far Right is, especially when they always seem to win national elections. They do seem to have a knack for appealing to base public sentiments, and I suppose religious demogoguery does entail a certain genius, but when it comes to the actual skills necessary to govern, these people just don't have it.

Witness the on-going tour de farce concerning the Senate sub-committee investigating the "Oil-for-Food Scandal". The investigation, designed to score cheap political points against the U.N. (wow, there's corruption in the Middle East; who knew?), has now completely boomeranged. This morning's revelation by the committee that more than half of the money went to American oil companies, and was signed off by the Bush Administration, has finally caught the attention of the media. And as if that wasn't bad enough, today was the day that Loony Left M.P. George Galloway was called to testify in open session about allegations he personally received kickbacks from Saddam. There was only one problem: the committee was relying on evidence that seems to have originated from the same mill that produced the Killian Documents. Quote the Beeb:

[A] spokesman for Mr Galloway's Respect party told a press conference the document used by the Senate hearing was a forgery. The spokesman said: "The actual first document, we don't know where it is, they don't know where it is and all they have is a photocopy handed over by an unnamed source." Typographical analysis showed Mr Galloway's name was in a different typeface, a lighter shade and at a different angle to the rest of the document, he said. The spokesman suggested Mr Galloway's name had been stuck to the bottom of the list, and the document photocopied. He also cited testimony from an Iraqi who claimed he forged lists of people who profited from the oil for food scheme.

Galloway, who won a libel suit against the Daily Telegraph after revealing a similar scam, then tore the sub-committee chairman, Norman Coleman, a new one, before forcing the rest of the Republicans to strip naked and stacked into a human pyramid.